Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier, the archbishop of Malines (Mechelen), Belgium, dies at 74. His open resistance to German occupation of Belgium during the Great War, including issuing a pastoral letter saying no obedience was owed to the occupiers, made him an important national symbol.
The British plan to force Maharajah Tukoji Rao Holkar III of Indore, an Indian princely state, to abdicate (this will happen next month). Last year Mumtaz Begum, who will be repeatedly called a “dancing girl,” escaped from his harem, blaming a nurse for the death of her female baby. She was taken in by a Muslim Bombay textile merchant. The maharajah sent men all the way to Bombay to take her back; they killed the merchant and injured her, but were fought off by... British officers with golf clubs? Really? One of the would-be kidnappers was captured and several put on trial, including an Indore general whose defense attorney was Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the future first president of Pakistan. Tukoji will marry an American woman and mostly live in exile in France, dying in 1978 at 87. Begum will attempt an acting career in the US; it’s unclear what happened with her.
New York cops, including the bomb squad, guard a performance of Carlo Tresca’s play “L’Attentato [Attack/Assassination] a Mussolini,” which makes fun of The Duck. Tresca, a leftie who made all the right enemies, was convicted in the US in 1923, supposedly at the request of the Fascist government, for printing an ad for birth control in his newspaper, but had his sentence commuted by Coolidge. He’ll be assassinated in NYC by the Mafia, or possibly the NKVD – as I said, all the right enemies – in 1943.
A couple of religious fanatics from a Bordeaux, France sect called Our Lady of Tears, are on trial for attacking the Abbé Desnoyers, the village priest of Bombon, 600 km from Bordeaux, with sticks and staves because of sorcery. There were 10 women and 2 men in the mob but only the men are on trial. Evidently the priest ensorceled some migrating birds, as one does, which then flew over Bordeaux where they caused the growth of “poisoned mushrooms of lascivious shape and noxious odor, which gave the residents on the banks of the Gironde shameful diseases in various forms,” so clearly he had it coming.
A lost Polish colony is discovered by a roaming Polish anthropologist in the state of Espírito Santo, Brazil. It hadn’t been heard from since 1873. The original settlers are all dead; their descendants still speak Polish. I couldn’t discover what happened to them.
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